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Apple Seeds ZFS Read/Write Developer Preview 1.1 for Leopard

My attraction to ZFS and my willingness to wait for it is that it seems like such a filesystem is well suited for TimeMachine.

Why is it I feel Leopard is going to be a kind of half-baked release?
 
What kind of company that stakes alot of it's reputation on it's operating system would plan on releasing the new version of it within day's of declaring the GM? I think it is risky & it is half-baked.:confused:

This might not be a pretty sight?

RichP said:
My attraction to ZFS and my willingness to wait for it is that it seems like such a filesystem is well suited for TimeMachine.

Why is it I feel Leopard is going to be a kind of half-baked release?
Click to expand...

psychofreak said:
Probably because it is...
Click to expand...

sblasl said:
What kind of company that stakes alot of it's reputation on it's operating system would plan on releasing the new version of it within day's of declaring the GM?
Click to expand...
A company that faces opposition from an OS with a LOT of glass and shiny stuff that is quickly overtaking its main product...
 
semireg said:
ZFS will make time machine faster and more usable by allowing snapshots at the filesystem level. You'll be able to plugin an external drive and zam, a few ZFS commands later and a full clone of your mac is made on the external drive. All of the snapshots in between backups can be time machined to.
Click to expand...

Would you be so kind as to demonstrate to me exactly what these "few ZFS commands" are?

This is probably the fourth time I've posted this on these forums but I will say it again. That is not how ZFS snapshots work.

Please stop spreading misinformation. You don't have to make things up to hang, not everyone can be an expert.
 
I still dont understand any part of ZFS, or, i guess, filestsytems in general...Ive been trying to understand since the initial rumor that ZFS was coming, and i still am at square zero, not know a single thing about whats going on, and how this affects me. :(
 
Nicky G said:
This has been bothering me for a while -- there's got to be a reason for it, but it's tough to consider what scenarios exist that would make it terribly useful. Sounds like you know, and we may just have to wait and be surprised. ;)
Click to expand...

Once they get RW going, Apple will be producing a full blown storage appliance like this one, or this one - only Apple style. Plug it in, let it do the rest. Built on ZFS so it's extendable and more or less bullet proof.

Read only is a different matter - someone else would be producing content and storing it so you can read from it. I remember way back when Linux could only read from NTFS drives. It was useful in its own way, because I could dual-boot into Linux and at least read from my NTFS drive. I suppose read only ZFS could be useful for a similar reason - anyone out there dual booting Solaris with OS/X?
 
10.5.0 is for all practical purposes a public beta. 10.5.1 will be worth installing for bleeding edge users. 10.5.2 will probably be installed on shipping hardware (if 10.5.0 or 10.5.1 is, that would be "bad"), and will still require several software updates to use reasonably.

If you are a "trailing edge" user, please do yourself a favor and wait for 10.5.3.

Rocketman

To answer Cromulant I am not subject to NDA. Therefore I am free to talk at will.
 
Rocketman said:
10.5.0 is for all practical purposes a public beta. 10.5.1 will be worth installing for bleeding edge users. 10.5.2 will probably be installed on shipping hardware (if 10.5.0 or 10.5.1 is, that would be "bad"), and will still require several software updates to use reasonably.

If you are a "trailing edge" user, please do yourself a favor and wait for 10.5.3.

Rocketman
Click to expand...

I'd be interested to know if you were basing that or anything. Unless you have been using the developer seeds you can't possibly know that.

Plus whatever you have been using you definitely can't say which point release will make Leopard stable enough for all users.
 
Telp said:
I still dont understand any part of ZFS, or, i guess, filestsytems in general...Ive been trying to understand since the initial rumor that ZFS was coming, and i still am at square zero, not know a single thing about whats going on, and how this affects me. :(
Click to expand...

The defining charactistic is a "storage pool". Pool being 2 or more discs. If a drive fails, the data is safe. If you add a drive to a pool it adds capacity but does not change its "logical" treatment and if you added ANOTHER drive, you increased reliability as well as capacity. The filesystem is in effect an OS that manages data and drives so all you see as a user is the "pool". Think of it as your existing USB thumb drive but with 2-20 totally separate data storage chips such that if 2-7 chips fail or are physically damaged, you are still fully online and safe.

Oh, and it doesn't care if the drives are local, remote, network attached, or accessed via Wimax.

Rocketman
 
What if.....

In the initial 10.5 release, Resolution Independent (RI) and ZFS are not incorporated. Instead it will be added in a 10.5.x update.

Reason for this might be that the bugs at present to include ZFS and RI are not quite worked out, and the software would not utilize portion of the components. However once ready it can be added in similar to a plug-in for the OS and you have a Next Generation OS released as promised in October and acquiring extras once the software developers are ready to utilize it.

:apple: did this for Boot Camp, there is a good possibility. :)

Any thoughts?
 
Rocketman said:
10.5.0 is for all practical purposes a public beta. 10.5.1 will be worth installing for bleeding edge users. 10.5.2 will probably be installed on shipping hardware (if 10.5.0 or 10.5.1 is, that would be "bad"), and will still require several software updates to use reasonably.

If you are a "trailing edge" user, please do yourself a favor and wait for 10.5.3.

Rocketman

To answer Cromulant I am not subject to NDA. Therefore I am free to talk at will.
Click to expand...

Unless 10.5.1 or 10.5.2 will be released by MWSF '08 along with MBP. :)
 
Peace said:
The obvious question people should be asking is what is the purpose of ZFS "read-only" in Leopard ?
eh?

think about it.
Click to expand...

semireg said:
I'm positive that ZFS has, and always will be an integral part of time-machine. The reason it was "pulled" was because the thunder was stolen from Job's by the Sun exec. Always been there... nothing to see here.
Click to expand...

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1446/zfs_ten_reasons_to_reformat_your_hard_drives said:
The simple creation of snapshots and clones of filesystems makes living with ZFS so much more enjoyable. A snapshot is a read-only point-in-time copy of a filesystem which takes practically no time to create and uses no additional space at the beginning.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm gonna go with ZFS=time machine :)
 
Telp said:
I still dont understand any part of ZFS, or, i guess, filestsytems in general...Ive been trying to understand since the initial rumor that ZFS was coming, and i still am at square zero, not know a single thing about whats going on, and how this affects me. :(
Click to expand...

Google is your friend. There is plenty of information out there on Ars Technica and other sources. Much of it is quite accessible even to people without extensive FS knowledge.
 
Rocketman said:
To answer Cromulant I am not subject to NDA. Therefore I am free to talk at will.
Click to expand...

So you are not basing that off anything then... unless you have downloaded Leopard.

The words arse your pulling out of and information come to mind for some reason.

There is no way as I said before that you can predict what the point releases will do to Leopard in terms of stability and reliability. You have just stated conjecture as fact.
 
Rocketman said:
The defining charactistic is a "storage pool". Pool being 2 or more discs. If a drive fails, the data is safe. If you add a drive to a pool it adds capacity but does not change its "logical" treatment and if you added ANOTHER drive, you increased reliability as well as capacity. The filesystem is in effect an OS that manages data and drives so all you see as a user is the "pool". Think of it as your existing USB thumb drive but with 2-20 totally separate data storage chips such that if 2-7 chips fail or are physically damaged, you are still fully online and safe.

Oh, and it doesn't care if the drives are local, remote, network attached, or accessed via Wimax.

Rocketman
Click to expand...

Thats awesome. What does it mean if you only have your internal drive?
 
ZFS sounds amazing to me in terms of data reliability and integrity. It'll be a beautiful addition to my Desktop where I keep all my media and data and need 100% redundancy of it.

However, I have a MacBook right now and can't see how it would help me out with only one drive available.
 
Peace said:
The obvious question people should be asking is what is the purpose of ZFS "read-only" in Leopard ?
eh?

think about it.
Click to expand...

I'll make a guess. Time machine restorations and file etc.... recall (perhaps with Apple TV also). Like I said it's just a guess as the only thing I know about ZFS is what I have read here and a few links on this issue. :confused:
 
dernhelm said:
Once they get RW going, Apple will be producing a full blown storage appliance like this one, or this one - only Apple style. Plug it in, let it do the rest. Built on ZFS so it's extendable and more or less bullet proof.
Click to expand...

Well, Apple does already have Xserve RAID, Xserve, & Xsan -- so someone who needs protection for their data already has plenty of options available to them (as well as the benefits of a clustered file system where multiple users can concurrently read-write to the same volume.) There are a bunch of other backup solutions, storage, etc. that are Mac-friendly. However, I agree that ZFS will allow for more people to get some of these kinds of benefits on the desktop.

Wikipedia has a great note relating to the file-number limit of ZFS:

"Although a statement quoted from [this page] asserted that "If 1,000 files were created every second, it would take about 9,000 years to reach the limit of the number of files", this is far short of the reality: If a billion computers each filled a billion individual file systems per second, the time required to reach the limit of the overall system would be almost 1,000 times the estimated age of the universe."

:D
 
semireg said:
I'm positive that ZFS has, and always will be an integral part of time-machine. The reason it was "pulled" was because the thunder was stolen from Job's by the Sun exec. Always been there... nothing to see here.
Click to expand...

And then they released a somewhat unfinished developer's preview as a way to throw everyone off the scent! Genius!
 
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